Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments

by Burton Raffel (Translator), Guy Davenport (Introduction)

“For there is indeed something we can call the spirit of ancient Greece–a carefully tuned voice that speaks out of the grave with astonishing clarity and grace , a distinctive voice that, taken as a whole, is like no other voice that has ever sung on this earth.”
–BURTON RAFFEL, from his Preface

For centuries, the poetry of Homer, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Sappho, and Archilochus has served as one of our primary means of connecting with the wholly vanished world of ancient Greece. But the works of numerous other great and prolific poets–Alkaios, Meleager, and Simonides, to name a few–are rarely translated into English , and are largely unknown to modern readers. In Pure Pagan, award-winning translator Burton Raffel brings these and many other wise and witty ancient Greek writers to an English-speaking audience for the first time, in full poetic flower. Their humorous and philosophical ruminations create a vivid portrait of everyday life in ancient Greece –and they are phenomenally lovely as well.

In short, sharp bursts of song, these two-thousand-year-old poems speak about the timeless matters of everyday life:
Wine (Wine is the medicine / To call for, the best medicine / To drink deep, deep)
History (Not us: no. / It began with our fathers, / I’ve heard).
Movers and shakers (If a man shakes loose stones / To make a wall with / Stones may fall on his head / Instead)
Old age (Old age is a debt we like to be owed / Not one we like to collect)
Frankness (Speak / As you please / And hear what can never / Please).
There are also wonderful epigrams (Take what you have while you have it: you’ll lose it soon enough. / A single summer turns a kid into a shaggy goat) and epitaphs (Here I lie, beneath this stone, the famous woman who untied her belt for only one man).

The entrancing beauty, humor, and piercing clarity of these poems will draw readers into the Greeks’ journeys to foreign lands, their bacchanalian parties and ferocious battles, as well as into the more intimate settings of their kitchens and bedrooms. The poetry of Pure Pagan reveals the ancient Greeks’ dreams, their sense of humor, sorrows, triumphs, and their most deeply held values, fleshing out our understanding of and appreciation for this fascinating civilization and its artistic legacy.

Genres: Poetry, Mythology, Greece, Classics, Ancient History, Paganism, Literature

81 pages, Hardcover

First published July 6, 2004

About the author

Burton Raffel was a translator, a poet and a teacher. He has translated many poems, including the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf.

Reviews

[Steve]

[Nota bene: I have combined the reviews of three books into one and used the same review for each. So if you have read one, you have read all three.]


Meleager brings you his lamp, O Venus,
For it knows how he celebrates you in the dark.


The Greek Anthology is an unusual text with roots in an anthology of epigrams first compiled by Meleager of Gadara in the 1st century BCE and supplemented over the centuries by various editors/compilers until it contained over 4,000 poems of various length and type including epitaphs and prayers.(*) The poems date between the 7th century BCE through the 6th century CE. It is the richest source we have of ancient Greek lyric poetry, as opposed to their more familiar epics, didactic poetry and poetic dramas. The Greek Anthology has a very complicated textual history, not the least reason for which is the fact that many of the sentiments expressed by poems in the collection, particularly of a sexual nature, were not of the sort that soothed Christian spirits. So the text suffered some serious violations at the hands of medieval monks and self-righteous Victorians, among others.

An additional complication is that there are dozens and dozens of translations of selections of poems from the Anthology, and that all these translators have very different ideas of how to render the poems into English. So, one is faced with the problem of deciding which selections and translators one should read. To read the entire anthology would be quite a task, though it is available in English in a five volume bilingual edition by W.R. Paton in the Harvard Loeb series (and therefore in some of the stiffest English imaginable).

After casting about for guidance here and there and then sampling some of the texts, I settled on M.L. West's Greek Lyric Poetry, Burton Raffel's Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments, and Kenneth Rexroth's Poems from the Greek Anthology, at least to begin. These books are very different from each other, nor do they all restrict their selection to the Greek Anthology.(**) But all three give us an interesting glimpse into ancient Greek lyric poetry.

Raffel's Pure Pagan (2004) is a slim volume of selections of "less well known poems and poets" from the 7th century BCE to the 1st century CE, and Raffel has chosen to give the poems a modern face. Though he writes that he neither "embroiders" the work nor puts "words into their mouths," his line breaks, stanza shapes and tendency towards linguistic spareness are modern. Consider, as an extreme example, what he does with the following fragment of Alkaios (also anglicized via Latin as Alcaeus; born c. 620 BCE)

Trees:
All right,
Plant trees.
But first
Plant
Vines.

West, who translates all extant lyric poems dating prior to 450 BCE (excepting the extensive works of Pindar and Bacchylides) in his Greek Lyric Poetry (1993), renders this fragment soberly as

Let the vine be the first fruit-tree you plant: others can wait their turn.

Rather a difference there.(***)

Rexroth, whose fine translations of classic Chinese and Japanese poetry I much appreciate and have reviewed elsewhere, makes his selection only from the Greek Anthology, a book, he assures us in his introduction, that accompanied him everywhere for decades.(4*) An accomplished poet himself, Rexroth states that the classical Greeks and Chinese made him the poet he was. His primary goal in this collection was to create beautiful English poems that were faithful to the meaning of the originals; the complicated metric structure of the elegiac couplets was left aside. Unlike the other two, Rexroth's selection favored the Hellenistic poets over those of the archaic and classical periods.

Though West has the advantage of completeness over both Raffel and Rexroth, within the indicated limits, this advantage is also a drawback. For reading fragment after fragment after fragment results in the same sense of exasperated frustration one feels when one reads the remnants of the works of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Because they have the luxury of choice, the other two translators can select fragments that mimic some kind of wholeness. Though Raffel provides some background material and some notes of explanation (Rexroth let's them "stand on their own"), West's introduction and notes are notably more informative.

As usual, no perfect choice can be made here, so I purchased the lot. Let's turn the stage over to the poets now.

By Sappho (born between 632 and 612 and died around 570 BCE) - translated by M.L. West

Rich-throned immortal Aphrodite,
scheming daughter of Zeus, I pray you,
with pain and sickness, Queen, crush not my heart,

but come, if ever in the past you
heard my voice from afar and hearkened,
and left your father’s halls and came, with gold

chariot yoked; and pretty sparrows
brought you swiftly across the dark earth
fluttering wings from heaven through the air.

Soon they were here, and you, Blessed Goddess,
smiling with your immortal features,
asked why I’d called, what was the matter now,

what was my heart insanely craving:
“Who is it this time I must cozen
to love you, Sappho? Who’s unfair to you?

“For though she flee, soon she’ll be chasing;
though she refuse gifts, she’ll be giving;
though she love not, she’ll love despite herself.”

Yes, come once more, from sore obsession
free me; all that my heart desires
fulfilled, fulfill—help me to victory!

There are other women poets in the Anthology. One of them wrote a favorite of Rexroth:

By Anyte (early 3rd century BCE) - translated by Kenneth Rexroth

The children have put purple
Reins on you, he goat, and a
Bridle in your bearded mouth.
And they play at horse races
Round a temple where a god
Gazes on their childish joy.

By Anacreon (582 BC – 485 BCE) - translated by M.L. West

He used to wear a rough cloak, pinched in at the waist,
and wooden baubles in his ears, and round his ribs
a hairless cowhide, the unwashed

covering off a cheap shield; and he used to go
with baker-women and with rent-boys on the make,
seeking a phony livelihood.

His neck was often in the stocks or on the rack,
his back flogged with a rawhide whip, his hair and beard
plucked out, the “poor wretch” Artemon.

And now he wears gold ear-rings, rides about in traps,
“Koisyra’s son”, and holds an ivory sunshade up,
as ladylike as anything.

By Krates (I don't know which Krates this is) - translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Time’s fingers bend us slowly
With dubious craftsmanship,
That at last spoils all it forms.

And, finally, a lament common to every time and every place:

By Menecrates (born c. 340 BCE) - translated by Burton Raffel

We all pray for it
Before it comes,
Then blame it
When it arrives.
Old age is a debt
We like to be owed,
Not one we like to collect.


(*) To speak of "it" is misleading. What we have now is a folding together of a number of medieval manuscripts, primary among which are the Planudean Anthology and the Palatine Anthology. The Planudean text is named after the monk Maximus Planudes, who took serious liberties with the Byzantine manuscript which came into his hands. The Palatine Anthology is believed to be the only extant, though partial copy of that Byzantine manuscript, compiled around 1,000 CE by Constantinus Cephalas.

(**) For example, both Raffel and West chose some poems from the three volume Lyra Graeca, but those books are themselves based partially on the Greek Anthology and partially on fragments found elsewhere. I'm not obsessive enough to care if a particular poem comes from the Greek Anthology or not...

(***) West's version gives a fair rendering of the rhythm of the Greek original, whereas Raffel makes no efforts in that direction at all.

(4*) More precisely, he added a handful of poems from the Latin originally intended for a similar volume of Roman poetry, a project he discarded.

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/958...

[Eadweard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two that stood out.



ALKAIOS:

I loathe Love,
wasting his arrows on me
Instead of aiming at huge wild beasts.
Do gods win glory by burning up men?
Is my head a noble trophy to hang from his belt?




MENANDER:

To learn just who you are
Look at tombs as you walk.
They hold the bones, the powdered dust
Of kings and tyrants, of wise men,
Of men proud of their noble fathers,
Of men glorying in their gold and their glory
And their beautiful bodies.
And when the time came
What protected them against death?
Nothing.
Everyone living dies the same death.
Look at tombs and learn just who you are.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

ALKAIOS

HISTORY
Not us: no.
It began with our fathers,
I’ve heard.

PHILOSOPHY
Nothing
Will
Come
Of
Anything.


ALKMAN

FATE AND NECESSITY
The thread
Runs thin,
The need
Runs hard,
Hard.

NOT APHRODITE, NO
Not Aphrodite, no. But like a child,
Wild, Love comes down,
Almost as though walking on flowers—
But should not touch them,
Should not,
No.

THE PEAKS ARE ASLEEP
The peaks
are asleep
And gulleys
And ravines
are asleep
And creeping things
Out of the dark earth
And the beasts on the hills
are asleep
And bees, all bees
And monsters deep in the sea
are asleep


ANONYMOUS

PRAYER
Zeus, king, give us good even if we don’t pray for it,
And give us nothing evil even if that is what we pray for.

*

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amusing, sometimes funny, sometimes profound selection from the so-called Greek Anthology.
Plus one star for the excellent introductory essay by Guy Davenport - one of those pieces that was never collected in any of his books.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a few gems in here. I would say my favorites are the poems by Callimachus. There are a number of these short collections that each purport to some unique spin on the lyric genrea. As it stands I haven't found a really large collection other than what is available in the Loeb series. The introductory essay in this edition is really worth your time. In it some very interesting points were raised about, and I am paraphrasing "that man is the animal that has tamed himself, through civilization, and a horse is an animal that man must tame." This perhaps sheds some light on the opening and closing lines of the Iliad.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sweet little collection of Greek epigrammatic poetry. My only complaint is that there is no facing Greek text or critical notes. I know that the intended (broad) audience doesn't necessarily want those things, but, well, some of us do!

[Petruccio Hambasket IV · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick afternoon read. This entire collection of Greek fragments could be put into this review block without passing the character limit. Some of these are incredibly depressing:

"Friends? My friends are nothing,
And I weep for them,
And for me."

some are more introspective,

"He lived by his sling,
Hunting winged geese, Creeping silently up
As they fed, watching on every side
But not seeing him.
He lived poor, he died poor.
Now he lives in the darkness
And his sling hangs motionless,
No hand to whirl it
Swift and sure,
And the geese fly over his tomb".

However, most are about wine. Dig in my fellow hellenophiles.

[Al Maki]

An anthology of not well known Greek lyrics running from around 700 bce. Death, loss, the joys of life and politics are the predominant subjects. Compression and irony dominate.

"Once corpses left the city behind them, dead,
But now the living carry the city to her grave."

Reading these poems I got a sense of the root of modern Greek poetry. The one bone I have to pick with the book is that Greek culture was constantly evolving but the poems are arranged alphabetically by the name of the author so there is no sense of the development. It's a long way from Archaic Greece to the Hellenistic era, but here it's all mixed up.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful collection of translations of ancient Greek poems - much of it surprisingly funny, although other works offer insight into melancholy topics such as mortality, etc. I found this book of poetry a pleasure to read and would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in an immediate and bracing "passport" to classical antiquity!

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know why so many little 'pocket-sized' selections of the Greek Anthology exist but you can't just buy the Greek Anthology itself, even in separate volumes. Oh well. It's not like I don't really like any of the selections I've read.

[Kenning JP Garcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly witty.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe it's the translation but many of the poems have a rough feel to them, like they're from the early ages of poetry which I'm not sure is really the case for Greek poetry.

[Robin Burton · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4 stars.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite poet-translators, Burton Raffel, translated these Greek lyrics. Through their poetry, the poets in this anthology offer a window into ancient Greek culture. Among them are the very obscure to the somewhat less obscure, with a few familiar names like Plato. There are poems and fragments of poems for everyone's taste. Reading them, I enjoyed making connections with my own life and our twenty-first century culture. Seeing how these ancient poets influenced some of our greatest contemporary poets was also fascinating.

"Pure Pagan" is celebrated for its role in bringing obscure Greek poetry to light, offering readers a glimpse into the diverse voices of ancient Greece. I appreciate Raffel's modern interpretation. Because of its wide range of selection and lively, if occasionally contentious, translation style, it is a great addition for anyone interested in ancient poetry. Overall, it is a beautiful selection of poetry.

If you're interested in exploring ancient Greek poetry through a contemporary lens, this book might serve as an engaging introduction or a complementary read to more traditional translations. However, for those seeking a translation closer to the original rhythm and tone, opinions suggest looking at other translators' works as well.

[Llefser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up at Half Price Books for $6. Translations and style owe much to Mary Barnard's translation of Sappho's poem fragments (she, of course, was greatly influenced by Ezra Pound).

The foreward was also particularly good.

[Margot · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this book for several years, a gift from my mother. took it with me on a brief camping trip, to finally read. What cleverness, what eloquent and direct, and often funny, and thus- genuine - reflections on human conditions such as death, old age, lust, love, spirituality, grief...etc.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

a lovely rendering of fragments. Some fabulous ones.

A magnificent doctor's waiting room read waiting fr the cancer test results. PUts things in perspective.

[Kaye · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that I just keep turning to. It has such an interesting mix of the sacred and profane poetry.

[Shawna · Rating 2 out of 5]

The fragments chosen and the translations were a little disappointing. Still, the book was interesting (and short) enough to finish easily.

[Lamoreaux · Rating 5 out of 5]

A pleasurable selection and translation, brief enough to have the reader longing for more. The introduction by Guy Davenport is worth a look, too.

[Dearwassily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of course I prefer If Not, Winter but still enjoyed this more than expected.